Jailbreak
When Rhoda, maid to John Mark and his mother, said Peter was standing at the gate, nobody in the house believed her.
44
When Rhoda, maid to John Mark and his mother, said Peter was standing at the gate, nobody in the house believed her.
44
St Peter was imprisoned during the purge of Christians ordered by Herod Agrippa in AD 44, during which St James, brother of St John the Evangelist, was executed. Peter’s miraculous jailbreak is a tale into which another evangelist, St Mark, also comes; but the star of Luke’s superbly crafted account is Rhoda, the scatterbrained maid.
Taken from [getkjvref:Acts 12].
NOW about that time Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church.* And he killed James the brother of John with the sword. And because he saw it pleased the Jews, he proceeded further to take Peter also. (Then were the days of unleavened bread.)* And when he had apprehended him, he put him in prison, and delivered him to four quaternions* of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter* to bring him forth to the people. Peter therefore was kept in prison: but prayer was made without ceasing of the church unto God for him.
And when Herod would have brought him forth, the same night Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains: and the keepers before the door kept the prison. And, behold, the angel of the Lord came upon him, and a light shined in the prison: and he smote Peter on the side, and raised him up, saying, Arise up quickly. And his chains fell off from his hands.
* This was in AD 44. See The Martyrdom of St James the Great. The Herod mentioned in this passage is not Herod the Great, King of Judaea at the time of Jesus’s birth, but Herod’s grandson, Herod Agrippa I, son of Aristobulus IV. Agrippa ruled as King of Judaea from 41 to 44.
* In this way, Luke explains that these events took place in the days before Passover, in the Spring of that year.
* A quaternion is a very rarely used word meaning a set of four. There were sixteen soldiers guarding the jail.
* Agrippa of course did not think of the feast as ‘Easter’, a peculiarly English word for a peculiarly Christian feast, but as Passover or in Luke’s original Greek ‘Pascha’. The word Easter is probably derived from a pagan goddess of Spring, Ēastre, and is of Germanic origin.